Lions

One of my fondest memories from my further maths lessons back in my school days occurred when one of my colleagues brought to our attention the many ways a mathematician may trap a lion. In many a surreal moment I have stared wanly into the middle distance trying to recall exactly what was in the list, and the best I could do was simply remember with fondness that it was funny. Fortunately for me I need stare wanly no longer and I may trap lions to my heart's content for Bjorn has compiled a list of many ways to do this. Thank-you Bjorn! He also shares an amusing exam answer where a student took up the ages old challenge of finding x with great success!

Also I've followed the advice of Mr Goose and started using The TeXer for making small gifs of tex online - it's very handy, but I wanted to draw your attention to the excellent host site, called The Art of Problem Solving, claiming to be the world's largest online maths community. In particular I wanted to share my pleasure at their little geometric animations in the bottom left hand corner of the site as I think they are wonderful, I particularly like this one (which I have stolen (!) the end result of from their excellent site ):

P.S. Peter Woit provides yet another excellent link to online lectures, this time by Penrose, Weinberg, Maldacena amongst others at the Perimeter Institute. Peter was referring, in particular, to the emergence of space-time talks which can be found at the bottom of the list on the left, and one of the talks is by Seth Lloyd, the views of whom have been recently commented on by Lubos Motl.